Mobile computing devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA), have become increasingly popular in recent years. As the devices continue to get smaller, there are increasing limitations in resources such as memory, storage, bandwidth, and battery. Additionally, more applications now require increasing levels of such resources. For example, many applications providing real-time updates (e.g., calendars, electronic mail, instant messaging) require frequent radio usage to persist connections. After the radio powers on to send data, the radio can take several seconds to power off (e.g., about 3 seconds on 2.5G networks and about 20 seconds on 3G networks). This radio “tail” absorbs power and diminishes device battery life.